Book Review: Wedding Bell Blues, by Ruth Moose

Becki's Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Title: Wedding Bell Blues
Author:  Ruth Moose
Series: Dixie Dew Mysteries
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Date of Publication: August 23rd 2016
Format: Hardcover (ARC)
Page Count: 336
Goodreads: Click
Amazon: Associates Link
Recommended? No
Similar Books: None (yet)
My Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Upon finishing this book, I'm left staring blankly at my posting screen asking myself "...what did I just read?" 

I'm a fan of cozy mysteries, but the most recent cozies I've read just don't deliver, and Wedding Bell Blues is no exception. The main character, Beth McKenzie, is lacking in depth and in many ways downright confusing. For example, at one point in the novel the author talks about how Beth met her best friend Malinda in middle school at the time of desegregation of schools. No previous descriptions had led me to see Malinda as a woman of color. This also left me confused, and a little bit thrown, because I had previously envisioned both Beth and Malinda as women in their thirties. After all, Malinda recently returned from college to work in a pharmacy, and she has a four-year-old little boy.

I like to be able to "see" the characters in my mind's eye and have an inner visual of the people who they are. While I could do this easily enough with Ida Plum or Verna (the next door neighbor), I struggled to get a good inner image of the other characters in the novel -- even when Ms. Moose described them.

But I liked them. I particularly liked Verna and Ida Plum, though I feel that Ms. Moose missed some remarkable opportunities with both of these characters. It's altogether possible that she put more flesh on their bones in Doing it at the Dixie Do. I wouldn't know, as I haven't read it. Truth be told, I don't think that I will be going back to read the book after having finished Wedding Bell Blues.

Cozy Mysteries often have several story lines going on at the same time. In this case, the stories that follow throughout the book are the wedding of Crazy Reba (a simple, homeless woman) to God, and the wedding of Ossie the police officer to Juanita, the hairdresser. It's the theme of the book, after all. Unfortunately, these stories aren't entertaining, and we never quite get to know enough about the characters involved.

After I had described this book to my husband, he said that it sounded like a Lifetime movie, and I think that's the best possible description of this book for me. It doesn't end, leaving many loose ends that are never tied up, and several of the sub-plots appear to be nothing but filler. Several opportunities to use sub-plots as "red herrings" are lost because the mystery aspect of the book is so simple that I found the solution obvious and boring. And I'm not good at solving mysteries!

I didn't find the novel funny, and I didn't find it entertaining, but I did finish it. I might not have been able to do that if it wasn't for one redeeming quality about the author's style: The chapters are short. I love short chapters, and they made the book easier to digest, since it was so difficult at times to follow the flow of this story.

If you love Lifetime movies, then you will probably enjoy this book. I, however, did not.

I welcome your comments on this book, and I would love a discussion of whether you enjoyed this novel or not, and the reasons why you felt the way that you did!

Disclosure: I received a copy of this novel from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.